


Bergamot and Iron

by EmmG



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Bittersweet, Christmas, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Occasional fluff, Pining, Reinhardt is the type to pine for years rather than doing something, Young Ana was sassy, big oaf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-26
Updated: 2016-12-26
Packaged: 2018-09-12 06:04:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9058810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmmG/pseuds/EmmG
Summary: She was always there to mock the tradition of the mistletoe until she wasn't.





	

**Author's Note:**

> These two deserve happiness dammit.

Fraternization is frowned upon only on paper. Jack Morrison is too oblivious to the subtler aspect of things; Gabriel Reyes too indifferent; Jesse McCree too young and careless; Doctor Ziegler too kind-hearted to cast a stare or remark; Torbjörn too, well, who can really tell with that accent and huffing and puffing intermixed with a healthy dose of crankiness.

They are a family of sorts. New and still growing scar tissue where they’ve been stitched together by circumstances, but a family nonetheless. They bury their noses in their cups until they’re well into them and all cheeks around the table have gone red.

Only then does their sniper, their Ana with her quick wit and quicker eye still, indulge in a cup of tea. Odd, to be sure, to reach for Earl Grey after a third (fourth?) glass of wine, but none dare question her controversial choice.

“Someone will need help standing up,” Reyes remarks, fingers weaved in a manner befitting a true villain in front of him.

“Shut up,” Ana replies, unfazed as always, pinkie finger darting upwards as she brings the steaming cup to her lips. “There’s mistletoe above you.”

“Well then, you should probably come over and give me a kiss.”

“Of course. Let me get my rifle.”

He isn’t entirely sure when he started smiling (or how long that smile has lasted) but he is. Reinhardt Wilhelm no longer feels like the odd man out with his thick accent and habits of a man left alone for too long. When they fight, when a violent blow manages to split his lip even beneath layers of thick Crusader armor, he curses in German and, from her sniper’s nest, on their private channel Ana answers back in Arabic. He never quite knows who she cusses out, nor does she figure out who exactly he calls a son of a bitch this time, but it’s always oddly comforting.

Perhaps that’s when he started smiling. He smiles still as she gives him a pat on the shoulder. He has to look down while she gazes up, brown eyes hazy and grin lazy. A cat stretched by the stove.

“Be a knight, help me up,” she says, words so low he must pluck them from her lips.

“Always, my lady,” he replies, over the top and loud and bolstering just because it always provokes a throaty chuckle and involuntary eye roll. An endearing sight.

“Merry Christmas,” Morrison calls after them—or perhaps manages to utter through a coughing fit for the dreadful whiskey Jesse brought finally succeeded in ravaging his vocal cords.

“So that’s what you’re celebrating,” Ana doesn’t miss a beat to reply. “Here I thought it was just another excuse to get drunk.”

“You knew what mistletoe was. Don’t play clueless now,” Reyes’ voice follows them out.

In the hallway, out of earshot and sight, beautiful Ana Amari grips him by the collar and, with soft hands and sudden determination, drags his head to her level. Reinhardt holds her wrists and doesn’t want to let go even if he isn’t the one holding on.

“Would I make a terrible mother if I were to go in to kiss Fareeha good night right now?” she murmurs, looking at him expectantly.

It takes him a moment. Perhaps two. Maybe longer. Ana’s left eyebrow is arched higher than he’s ever seen and she blows into his face before he can respond.

“Reinhardt?” she asks. “Do I need to hang mistletoe above you so you’ll finally tell me if I reek of a winery?”

He stumbles over words. He laughs to cover it up. His thumbs smooth circular patterns over his wrists and she laughs back. It’s there, somewhat concealed by strongly brewed tea, the taste of cheap wine. Her tongue is too pink; her mouth stained red.

“Ah, you would never.”

One hand lets go of him. Then he is hit with an open palm strike in the chest.

“That’s how I know you’re lying,” Ana says.

Her hair is wild and free of its usual neat braid. She sways and she is beautiful and she could still shoot a squirrel between the eyes if handed a rifle right this instant.

His laughter is akin to thunder while hers is raspy and caught at the back of her throat. When she stops, when she releases him completely, her features have softened.

“Merry Christmas, Reinhardt,” she murmurs. “Don’t be lonely.”

“Never, fräulein,” he promises her.

“One day you’ll have to tell me what that means.” She pauses at her door and shrugs, her back to him. “Or I might just pick up a dictionary.”

She doesn’t (not even in the years to come.) Perhaps as not to embarrass him. Perhaps to hear it again. Perhaps because of the tone he slips into whenever uttering that single word.

*

Years soften and harden Ana all at once. She is what holds their shaky group together. She is silent, but clever. Gone is the reflex to parry Reyes’ quips. Her solemn shake of the head is the only reprimand they require, her smile the only encouragement.

She isn’t subtle, because with him she can’t afford to be.

“Reinhardt,” she calls, pulling a chair out to crash into it after a long day’s work.

“At your service,” he replies, smiling broadly.

“As always.”

There she smiles too and the brief silence is blissful.

From her sleeve, she pulls a rolled-up poster. Slowly, it is unfolded before him and he is left with his own face staring back at him, victory pose and all.

“Will you sign it?” Ana asks. “It is for my Fareeha.”

He is great and impressive, a mountain of a man really, upon those posters. A side of himself that isn’t quite true. He’s the frontline here, at Overwatch, shield deployed to safeguard all those behind him. (To give her a safe line of sight, to deflect the flare of her scope, to never ever give her away.) Why, the last Crusader makes for an impressive figure. He looks and barely recognizes himself.

But at Eichenwalde he wasn’t first, nor was he last. Balderich von Adler stood there and fell.

Reinhardt smiles. He laughs. Because that’s what he always does. He takes the offered pen from Ana’s hand—pretends it doesn’t linger there, doesn’t cover hers a compromising moment too long—and merely remarks, “Ah, my hair looks amazing.”

Later, when little Fareeha is tucked at Ana’s side and his arm is around them as the entire crew poses for a photograph, he can’t help but think that this would make for a finer poster.

That year Ana isn’t with them for Christmas but quietly, quickly, Jack slips him a letter while they’re all nursing a shared hangover.

Ana in a summer dress with her daughter, a landscape of Cairo stretching out behind them as far as the eye can see. The loveliest of pictures.

 _She loves it_ , is the short inscription at the bottom.

 _Don’t be lonely_ , reads the postscript at the back.

He keeps it, frames it, and never allows a speckle of dust to settle over it.

*

They are cold. She, especially, is shivering. The sky is dark and the air heavy with dust. It is still hard to breathe following the explosion of the omnic factory. Their lungs will clutter and harden, he is certain, from the deposits.

Ana sits beside him in their too-small tent as they share a cup of, lukewarm at best, tea from a thermos that froze over time and again. Her braid isn’t in a crown around her head. It hangs from her shoulder, strands coming out.

“It’s that holiday, isn’t it?” she murmurs.

“Yes, yes it is,” he agrees, solemn.

“We gave the world very little this year.”

She speaks of the residential quarters that went up in flames just as the factory did. No one could have predicted the perimeter of the explosion—that it would be this wide. That people, as well as omnics, would fall in their attempt to do good.

“Ana, fräulein, have I told you of the time I charged off a cliff?”

For a second she looks at him as if he’s grown a second head, but then that wonderful throaty chuckle rumbles at the back of her throat and awakens.

“Oh yes,” she nods. “I was there all six times.”

“In my defense—”

“In your defense, you completely missed the target and pinned the bottom of the cliff instead.”

“Bah, it was nothing. I got back just in time—”

“—for us to deliver the payload while you huffed and puffed at the back.”

She is holding her face between her hands now. The scarf around her head has fallen so low that he can only see the beginning of the tattoo beneath her eye. Lips, chapped from the cold, move in excitement as she shapes words to recount his failures.

She sets to polishing her rifle; to keep her hands busy and warm, no doubt.

“I also distinctively remember every time you resorted to that—oh what, to call it—jumping strategy, shall we say, whenever your shield went down,” she whispers on excitedly.

“A moving target is hard to hit,” he points out.

“You’re a mountain, Reinhardt, move all you want you’re still impossible to miss.”

He interrupts the flow of her words and the motion of her hands all at once. Cutting short the former with a shake of his head and cradling the latter between his own, rubbing them, keeping the blood flowing. “Ah, but I am not the only one with tales of woe.”

“I do not know what you mean.”

He blows warm air onto her knuckles through her thin gloves; snipers can’t wear thick gear that obstructs movement. She sighs, content.

“Our poor angel suffered quite the heart attack when you hit her with your nano dart in Munich.”

She huffs, her breath crashing against his face. It is merely tea this time and she is closer than she’s been in years.

“Well,” Ana murmurs, “at least it makes for a story.”

Her hands begin to rub his back and, in that instant, he knows that this too will make for one. For him. Even if she never suspects it.

Reinhardt doesn’t know it yet, but he’ll retrieve the memory time and again from the vault of sacred things inside his head over the years.

*

He loves Ana Amari and all know but him.

“Turn your shield, man,” Jesse growls, furiously reloading his revolver. “I’m about to get hit by a rocket. She’s far away enough, it won’t touch her.”

He loves Ana Amari long after they no longer feature on promotional posters, too old to impress masses but not old enough to not be of use.

“You were better at this than me,” Gabriel grumbles as he attempts to pose, looking uncomfortable and stiff in a formal suit.

“Aye love, cheer up,” their new ever-grinning pilot chimes in.

He loves Ana Amari when the first grey makes it to his beard and streaks her long hair. When she cups the side of his face and smooths out a wrinkle with her thumb before it comes back anew.

The crinkles at her eyes deepen. “However did you manage to allow this to happen?” Her hand stays, warm and gentle, as she looks with sadness at his empty socket.

“Bah, I never needed two eyes anyway,” he retorts. “You’ll just have to look for the both of us now.”

“Always,” she promises, the pity fading to soft familiarity. “Who will keep you from falling off cliffs if not I?”

“Vielen dank, fräulein.”

He loves Ana Amari when she is too far away to touch, to feel, to smell—bergamot and eastern oils—but her beautiful face smiles warmly at him from a computer screen. Behind her, Cairo knows a sunny day and her hair, mostly white by now, is lifted and dropped by the breeze every so often.

“Are you very lonely?” she asks.

“Never,” he answers, too loud, too enthusiastic to be credible.

Ana rolls her eyes, leaning back into her lounge chair.

“Are you cold?” she asks.

“Yes,” he admits.

“Warm up before charging into pillars, will you, or you’ll strain your back, you old oaf.”

He promises because he must. The connection begins to break down, static distorting both of their faces.

“I see the snowstorm is hitting Gibraltar early,” Ana says, smiling sheepishly, knowing she won’t have to brave it this year.

Quickly, she presses two fingers to her lips. The kiss travels from her fingertips to the screen. Across the distance, he captures and keeps it.

He loves Ana Amari before he can tell her how much he adores her and the memory of her is buried at a ceremonial funeral where the earth is given nothing to hold.

That year, from under the mistletoe, he escorts a mute Fareeha to her quarters the walls of which no longer house an old poster of him.

*

They all are very silent. Very angry. Very relieved.

Gibraltar hasn’t known such a flurry of emotions in too long. Jack stalls him in the hallway with idle conversation; none of them are too good at it. None of them are quite what, or rather who, they used to be. Morrison hides his scarred face behind a mask now. He’s bashed in more heads in anger than justice at this point.

Then Jack leaves and he sees the figure he’s been shielding with his back.

She wears white and her hood hangs lower than ever. She fidgets, a phantom of a past he never managed to forget after twenty years of trying, but her smile is unchanged, if not hesitant. Twenty years during which she was first a stranger, then a friend, a never spoken-of beloved. Twenty years when she came close, drifted away and loved others while he tricked himself into doing the same. Those years don't matter, they are dust.

Her voice wavers. It’s steady. It is not. She’s always been the calm one. He isn’t certain anymore.

“Reinhardt, I must say you are looking quite well. This life must agree with you,” she says.

Her hand hovers above his outstretched one, feeling the air around it but never settling.

“And you are looking as lovely as ever,” he breathes just as the vault of memories overflows.

There will be justified anger later. Explanations he won’t quite understand, but will accept nonetheless.

But for now she warms his large hand with both of hers and after everlasting grief it’s more than enough.


End file.
